Is the Secret Service too broken to protect Trump? | If You're Listening | ABC NEWS In-depth

In June this year, a 9 -1 -1 operator took a pretty extraordinary phone call.The police arrived at the house to meet her 19 -year -old.The guys had all given themselves codenames.Sheppard, Fulcrum, Whiskey 6.Tyson was Prop Wong.

So you want to go to another state and meet up with people that you don't even know their real name?

Tyson and his gang, CERN -ing.

I'm concerned that you might have gotten caught up with something not so great.

Yeah, okay, so the sheriffs in Ohio seem pretty understated.So if you if you don't.And seven others have now been indicted on charges of conspiracy to murder federal government officials and other.Benjamin Netanyahu.He's really angry about the Epstein file.And call the cops.

There was a time when lone gunmen were the main threat to the president's safety, but increasing frequency.

Make no mistake, this was an attempted assassination of the president of the United States.

to make matters worse of a crisis, one they have been facing for more than a decade.

The Secret Service was experienced as staffing crisis that poses perhaps the greatest threat to the agency.

I've been taking a look at the state of the US Secret Service myself, and it's really bad.The agency is critically understaffed, underpaid, and seems to be regularly on the brink of catastrophe.In turmoil, he's facing an almost impossible challenge, keeping the president safe by predicting the unpredictable.I'm Matt Bevin, and this is If You're Listening.Whenever the US president travels abroad, a team of Secret Service special agents travel to the location two weeks beforehand to basically case the joint.

You know, roughly 15 and sometimes even 20 days, depending on the nature of the visit and the type of summit.

Their job is to make sure everything will be OK when the president arrives.

It's medical supplies and it's the whole White House is actually moving regardless of the length of time that the president is traveling.

Now as you can imagine this process involves the team doing recon around locations, checking rooms for listening devices, advance meetings to ensure that everything feels safe and secure.But completing all those tasks apparently doesn't take the full two weeks.And so the Secret Service team apparently has a bit of free time on their hands.Which is why, until relatively recently, the Secret Service and all the agents would party from the time they arrived ahead of President Barack Obama's visit to a summit, where this partying got out of hand.Now the agents were clearly very excited for this trip, as evidenced by the very serious and official email correspondence that they were sending to each other in the lead up.One of the emails read, Dem hoes.

The morning before President Obama's arrival, one of the Secret Service agents refused to pay a sex worker who he had convinced to spend the night with him a bill of $800.He reportedly thought that prostitution was illegal in Colombia, so she would be unable to report this to the police.Understandably, the whole incident was incredibly embarrassing for the Secret Service.

I do have a lot of jokes about the Secret Service.You know, I told them for $800, I wouldn't tell them.

But the fact that the Secret Service behaves so badly in Colombia shows one thing.They do not respect the president or the office of the president.

Worse than that.It exposed a very, very serious problem at the very heart of the problem.Service.One that puts their whole mission at risk.But before we get to that, I think it's important to understand exactly what the Secret Service actually is.Signed the legislation creating the Secret Service just a few hours before his death, which feels very ironic, but the Secret Service he was creating was wasn't designed to protect the president.

I had always thought the Secret Service protected the president since the service was established back in 1865.But Walter explained that this duty actually began with Theodore Roosevelt after the assassination of President McKinley in 1901.

And it's mostly about the thing the Secret Service was actually designed to do.

Now, most folks would never notice the tiny check letter and the faceplate number in the lower corner of every bill.But the Secret Service calls attention to them for identification purposes in its printed warnings of new counterfeits.

Yeah, turns out the Secret Service was originally created to prevent the scourge of counterfeit money.It took three presidential assassinations in 36 years.Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley.

Of course, watching over the president is the number one job of the Secret Service.

In 1901, the Secret Service was the closest thing the federal government had to a national detective force.So protecting the president was just kind of added to their job description.It seems weird to give a bunch of guys who signed up to look at the corners of banknotes the job of safeguarding the president, but the FBI didn't exist at the time, so this is just what they decided to do.

Whether the president travels on water, on land, or in the air, The Secret Service is close by, prepared for any emergency.

means that even now, a career as a Secret Service Special Agent generally means transferring backwards and forwards between protecting the President and investigating fraud and counterfeit money cases.

was our number one job.But he also said that suppression of counterfeiting and forgery was important, too.

They call it their dual mission.And look, it doesn't really make sense.I mean, having guys who are experts in what a president's head should look like on a dollar bill might be helpful in trying to protect the real life president's head from harm.But logical or not, it's an incredibly difficult job to qualify for.They have to pass extremely strict physical and mental tests and be able to meet the requirements to obtain TOPS lengthy process.Recruitment, testing and training typically takes over a year.

And then special agents are sent off for a or rounded.Then after all that, they're cleared to watch over the president.

The president of the United States.

The point is, this whole process takes years.very long time.So if an agent was to hypothetically not pay a Colombian sex worker and then create a very big and embarrassing scandal that resulted in them and many other agents being fired, replacing those agents would be an incredibly lengthy process.And, well, that's exactly what happened in 2012.

We have a zero tolerance policy for any kind of conduct of the kind that involves prostitution or anything of that nature.

The Cartagena incident led to arounddozen agents leaving the Secret Service, which led to revelations like this one.

In September of last year, a security contractor with an arrest record rode in an elevator with the president in Atlanta, armed with a gun completely unbeknownst to the president's detail.

Which is about as big an oversight as you can get.So let me tell you how that came about.

Good afternoon, everybody.Please be seated.I want to thank Dr. Frieden and everybody here at the Center for Disease Control for welcoming me here today.

When the president visits a government building like the CDC, the Secret Service sends a form to the agency asking for the details of any security personnel who will be on site.And on this occasion, the CDC filled out the form, listing the names of all of their security guards and stating that all of them would be armed.They returned the form to the Secret Service, but apparently it just sat on somebody's desk and nobody read it.So no background checks were run and Obama's Secret Service detail thought the security guards would not have guns, which were meant to indicate that they had been vetted.One of those guys, Kenneth's job was to take Obama upstairs in the elevator.

His staff got on the elevator and then he came and he got on the elevator.He, um, acknowledged me, he asked me what my name was, and he extended his hand and shook my hand.

Now, would have known had he been vetted.There he was, in an elevator, with a loaded gun in his holster, standing not a good look for the Secret Service.And then, to make matters worse, two days later, this happened.

The Secret Service is coming under renewed scrutiny after a man scaled the White House fence and made it all the way through the front door before he was arrested.

The man was apprehended in the east room of the White House residence.Like, the bit of the building where the president sleeps.Obama wasn't there at the time, but still, not great for the Secret Service.Every time an incident like this was uncovered, there were resignations.Morale at the agency was dropping, so even more people resigned.Eventually, congressional hearings began, looking into what was going on, and they found something staggering.

The Secret Service, at its peak, had a staffing level of 7 ,024 employees.This was in 2011.That number declined every year until the beginning of this year, when the agency had 6 ,289 employees.But by all accounts, you're some 500 to 1 ,000 people short of where you should be.

In 2015, a congressional report titled An Agency in Crisis was published.which showed that a massive contributing factor to the mistakes being made by the Secret Service was that staff were being forced to work ridiculous hours to make up for the swathe of resignations and the slow recruitment process.The following year was an election year, which meant that the Secret Service had to not only keep President Obama alive, but all of the candidates trying to succeed him, including this guy.

I'm so happy.

Candidate Trump loved hanging out with armed bikers, despite the Secret Service advising that that was a bad idea.

And Secret Service and all the law enforcement, they said, sir, I don't know if you're safe here.I said, I'm the safest guy in the world right here.

At the end of that year, Congress took testimony from Secret Service agents to see how they were coping.

And these are quotes.During this year, I've missed out onbirthdays and other life events.This has been ridiculous.It's far worse than 2012 campaign.Thankfully, I'm not married, but if I was, I'd probably be divorced by now.

Another agent.I average 43 days before I get a day off.It goes on and on.

Now, Secret Service agents do get overtime pay, but at the time, their pay was limited to a maximum of $160 ,000 a year.

And this overtime meant that in this campaign, and I'm currently over $60 ,000 over my pay cap, my wife feels as though she's a single mother and there's no financial benefit.I'm not getting paid.

In an attempt to alleviate the crisis and pulled on to protection details, which meant that we're on duty were exhausted, burned out.And thankfully, there were no serious security incidents during the 2016 campaign, nor during the 2020 campaign.2024, of course, was different.

Take a look at what happened.

Secret Service agents rushed a bloodied Mr. Trump.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, led to the resignation is the most significant operational failure.

of the Secret Service in decades.Donald Trump's golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida.

The gunman was hiding in bushes next to the sixth hole.Trump was playing on the fifth.

They have an agent that jumps one hole ahead of time to where the president was at.And he was able to spot this rifle barrel sticking out of the fence and immediately engage that individual.

Later investigations found that in 2024, the Secret Service was understaffed by more than 20 percent.The agents on Donald Trump's detail worked an average of 454 hours of overtime that year.That's the equivalent of11 extra weeks of work hit the pay cap that year.And so in 2025, the Secret Service started a recruitment drive.

State Secret Service is calling for a few more heroes.Will you step forward?

While also they've got to look at counterfeit bills for a few years before they get to the White House.So the problem of understaffing isn't going to be fixed anytime soon.But look, the record of the Secret Service since the last presidential assassination in 1963 is pretty good.Aside from one of Ronald Reagan's ribs, one of his lungs, and one of Donald Trump's ears, they have managed to keep every president and former president safe from physical harm for 63 years.But the trouble is, the kind of operations that the Secret Service is having to deal with are getting more complex.Lone gunmen used to be the only threat that presidents faced.

But now it's groups of gunmen and guys like Asif Merchant.This is a video that was secretly recorded in 2024 in a hotel room in New York of Asif Merchant talking to a guy that he thinks is an assassin.He's explaining his plan to assassinate Donald Trump at a campaign rally, present the crowd of people at the rally, and then he uses some objects to represent Trump and some of the tall buildings which could be used for sniper positions.Now, it turned out that the assassin was in fact an FBI informant, and Asif Merchant was later arrested.He has since testified at trial.that he was an operative of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, the IRGC, and that he was on a mission to hire a hitman to kill Donald Trump.

Over the next few months,another two men were arrested.They said that they had also been ordered kill Trump.

An alleged Iranian plot to kill the president led to beefed up security ahead of last weekend's rally.

All of these plots were apparently organised by the Revolutionary Guards as revenge for Trump killing one of their top commanders with an airstrike during his first term as president.And since Trump killed the Iranian supreme leader in an airstrike in February of this year, the IRGC is only ramping things up.Let's go live now to Ankara, the Turkish capital, where the US President Donald Trump has just touched down for a crucial NATO summit there.In July this year, President Trump was the closest he has been to Iran since the beginning of the war back in February.He was less than a thousand kilometres from the Iranian border.During the summit, he clearly had Iran on his mind.

I'm number one on the kill list for Iran.They're lovely people.I'm number one.

And the reason he was thinking about Iran trying to kill him is because, according to the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, usual amount of information about Trump's movements and sleeping arrangements at the NATO summit and that an Iranian proxy militant in the area may have a shoulder launched missile.

After officials determined there was a credible assassination threat against Donald Trump from Iran.

The US officials report boarded the Air Force One jumbo jet before being secretly loaded onto a catering truck.and transported to another plane, which he then flew on to the UK.

So I go by Secret Service and the military.They wanted me to go on a different flight, a different way to do it.So I do it.I do what they say.

The entire American delegation flew out of Ankara safely, with no evidence that any missiles were fired.But if this plot was real, that's an entire new level.of threat.Until the last couple of years the Secret Service's main fear was lone gunmen but now they're reckoning with both alleged domestic terrorist attacks but also international terrorist attacks orchestrated by the IRGC who apparently have surface -to -air missiles and intelligence on where Trump sleeps.For every IRGC plot the Secret Service or FBI foil, another two will pop up in their place.They've got all the time in the world, and they only have to succeed once.

The thing is, complex potential threats like this are happening with increasing frequency.And as we've established, the Secret Service isn't exactly firing on all cylinders.So what's the solution?Well, the congressional report into the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, recommended that Congress and the Department of Homeland Security should consider separating the dual missions of the Secret Service.Stop making the president's bodyguards moonlight as the counterfeit money fraud squad.Mind you, that's been the obvious fix for like about a century.

Now, does this 20 look fake to you?This one appears to be Chinese.Rounded edges on the treasury seal.Yeah, it's Scottish.

Hmm.

would be not legit.